The traditions that molded the woman that I am today are rooted in
the deep, segregated south―Mississippi. I hear my pretty mother's voice
in a youthful singsong as she chants the tongue twist of duplicate
letters that make up her birth state―M- little i, ss, little i, ss, little i, pp, little i.
I am rooted to segregation, yet I am a product of de-segregation. I am
both old world and new promise. I am both wounded and healed. I am the
leaf that grew from the extended olive branch when my beautiful
grandmother, Anna Belle Latham, uprooted her reluctant family and headed
out west in the early 1960s. When the Freedom Riders― men and women,
boys and girls, black and white― came calling, Anna Belle reached within
and then outward to find a more peaceful space, or perhaps she was simply following her soul's journey. Those freedom fighting
northerners were not welcomed, my mother told me. They were not called
to come in and unravel the package that was so nicely and so neatly
assembled in a pretty little segregated box. The shifts, and the unsettling,
my mother tells me, were not appreciated in a town where everyone knew
their place.

I am a child of the sixties and seventies―old world melding into new
promise. I was born and raised in the city of the angels, Los Angeles.
My childhood friends were Jewish, black, mixed, Chicano, Persian,
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, wealthy and poor. The mothers who visited my
elementary school class during the holiday season brought in Latke
pancakes and taught us Hanukah songs. The private parties in my high
school town near the beaches that lined the Pacific Ocean were filled
with surfers, dead heads, drug heads, sushi and a raw vegan feast that
at the time didn't have the fancy names. I am old, and I am new. I see
the pain, but I see the healing as well. Sometimes the densely packed
pain of a culture feels too heavy to move, too mired in the complicated,
complicit layers of the familiar where everyone knows their place.

This month One Woman One Voice Project features Rasib Mehmood, a
gentleman poet, a PhD scholar, a Pakistani national and the freedom
fighting face of new promise. With his lilting, deep-searching words,
Rasib stands poised to figuratively sit at the lunch counters where the
Freedom Fighters dared to peacefully stake their place. He stands poised
to begin the unraveling of the war men and women all over the world are
facing―domestic abuse and other gender-based warfare. My soul's journey is to bow in gratitude to the old while reaching toward the new. The old―the
segregation of women into stifling compounds of victimhood and men into
hallow, shame-filled pockets of denial― while the familiar, is packed too densely to see any
shards of light. The new―men and women of all nations, gay and
straight, old and young, gender-specific and not bound by masculine nor
feminine―is that reach for the mature marriage that Marion Woodman speaks of and perhaps our collective souls' journey as men and women. It is that peaceful space that my
beautiful Anna Belle found when she courageously settled in the dessert
land of promise leaving the tattered pieces of the familiar on the dusty
road behind her.

About Me

I am the founder of OneWomanOneVoiceProject.com, a social networking website and positive place on the Internet to connect, grow and thrive.
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